


Survive

by merrymegtargaryen



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:20:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymegtargaryen/pseuds/merrymegtargaryen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Wasteland that never ends with a life that never ends, his world is reduced to a single instinct: survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survive

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what this is. I'd like to expand on it someday if I could.
> 
> Basically I was prompted to write about time-traveling Max, but somehow it turned into Immortal Max. And I got a little carried away.

He’d been wandering this Wasteland for years.

Society crumbled and civilization fell into chaos. Radio, TV, phone, all of it went out. There were no countries and world leaders anymore, no more law and no officers to enforce it. There was only the Wasteland, and the two things everyone needed to survive in it: water and guzzoline.

(He remembered when it had once been called gasoline.)

Physically, he was still young, not yet middle-aged (or what was once middle-aged, in the days of long ago). But he’d been in the Wasteland for over half a century. He’d come here as a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. But something in the Wasteland had changed him. He didn’t age, but he was forced to watch the people he became briefly attached to drop like flies. He’d known people to be born, live, and die, all while he’d been in the Wasteland.

(You let us die, their voices whispered.)

When he’s kidnapped by the War Boys, he doesn’t know how much time has passed. But he’s not going to die, can’t die no matter how hard he tries (and he has tried). So he does what he’s always done: he survives. He fights so hard that they put a muzzle on him and chain him up in a cage. He catches bits and pieces about their world–they are the half-life War Boys of Immortan Joe. Show me this Immortan, he wants to tell them, but he doesn’t. He can barely remember how to talk these days.

He isn’t afraid when they strap him to the hood of the car. He’s angry, but he isn’t afraid. He’s angry and thirsty, because immortality leaves you thirstier than you’d ever imagined, and even though he almost drowns himself in the spray of water the women in white give him, it doesn’t feel like enough. They are afraid of him (they should be), but there’s something soft and precious about them. Except for their leader. A War Boy turned warrior queen. He sees flashes in her eyes, promises of what she has done and is doing and will do, and even if she isn’t immortal, even if she’s a half-life just like all the other War Boys, he has the feeling they both have seen more than any human should.

The wife with a full belly (Splendid? Angharad? he hardly knows what’s a name and what’s just a word anymore) is brave, braver than her sisters and braver than any pregnant woman running from a vengeful warlord ought to be, and he admires her for it. It’s her bravery that kills her, so flushed with victory that she slips and falls from the rig. He sees her slide under the wheels, and he’s seen enough people slide under wheels that he knows there’s no hope for her. The other wives scream and shout and sob behind him, but he can only look forward. He has to.

They get stuck in a bog and the other end of his chain, an excitable War Boy who asked him to witness, appears out of the mist and helps them, but it’s not enough. So he does the only thing he knows he can do–he survives. The shots ought to kill him, but he can’t be killed. It takes an embarrassingly short time to kill every man on the Bullet Farmer’s car, and then he loads up with all their weapons and adds a boot for the War Boy for good measure.

“Are you hurt?” the shortest of the wives asks when he returns, and he pretends not to understand.

“That’s not his blood,” the imperator says, and he lets her believe it. How do you explain three bullets to the head healing over because you can’t die?

They find the Many Mothers, the Vuvalini of the imperator’s dreams. They are tired, weathered women, mothers without children, and he is stunned to find how easily they understand him. He never speaks of it, never tells them anything about him, but they somehow know.

It’s this trust, this understanding, that makes him chase after them. This Wasteland never ends. He knows, because he’s tried to find the end. There isn’t any. It goes on and on forever. There’s nothing but salt.

They don’t have to find an end to the Wasteland. Instead they can take it back and make it theirs. They lose almost all of the Vuvalini in the canyon, though he suspects it will take more than falling off a moving truck to take down women like that. The imperator nearly dies trying to save him, the Immortan Joe is proven decidedly mortal, and the War Boy’s final act is ensuring none of the Immortan’s war party will survive to torment these women any longer.

The imperator breathes rattling, reedy breaths on the return journey. He opens up her lungs again, gives her his blood (he wonders, briefly, if sharing his immortal blood will make her immortal. Maybe there’s a War Boy struggling out of the wreckage of a war rig right now), and when she stills slips from consciousness, he knows it isn’t enough.

“Max,” he says, the first time the word has left his lips in God knows how many years. “My name is Max.” He says it almost like a benediction.

(I live, I die. I live again.)

And she doesn’t die. Hundreds of people have slipped from his fingers as easily as sand, but Furiosa is the one grain who stays long after the others have fallen. She is still injured, still barely able to stand, but she is alive.

“Let them up!” the crowd chants, and it’s a scattering of War Pups who take command. The platform rises with the women, and somewhere far above, water cascades on the dirty, dusty Wretched. It is one of the most beautiful things he has ever seen.

And that is how he knows it’s time to leave.

He knows he would be welcome here. He knows he could love and be loved. And that’s why he has to go. Because love means attachment, and with attachment comes the inevitable loss. These people, vibrant and full of life as they are now, will not always be so. He will become a shadow hunched in the corners if he stays here.

So he leaves. Furiosa sees him, and he’s glad. This will not be the last time they meet–he can feel it.

He leaves, searching the Wasteland, reduced to a single instinct:

Survive.


End file.
